I also had to upload 2000 photos. The issue was that they had to encrypt each, which took me like 2 days with it running in the background 😅 It could have also been due to my phone being quite old. I don’t rely on it that much, other than using it as an off-site back-up for my most important documents.

I do agree that the best choice is a self-hosted solution with proper security, but sadly not everyone has the time or the skills to manage that. The Proton CEO thing also annoyed me, but the Proton Foundation as a whole has good opinions about privacy (e.g., against chat control proposal in the EU). However, next time a slip like this happens from them, I’ll probably have had enough time to move my stuff to a local deployment.

Proton offers a Drive, and they’re based in Switzerland. I don’t see them being strong-armed like this by the UK government any time soon.

Might be even cheaper if you wait a bit and build it yourself. Next gen GPUs are coming out, which will lead to some price cuts on the current gen.

However, like others here have mentioned, you’re paying extra for them building it for you and warranty.

I don’t know if ro.pcpartpicker.com works well for Romania, but you can also give that a try and see what the individual components would net you on the local market.

Building the computer yourself along with your kid could also be a nice opportunity to teach him (and maybe yourself, if you’re not that knowledgeable) about the underlying components.

I haven’t tried it myself, but you could get a Garmin watch and add your cards there. I believe you don’t need the phone connected afterwards to make payments.

You can also generate a lower quality image and use an AI upscaler to increase the size of your artistic QR code.

I’m really sorry to hear that. I hope you have enough support to deal with it!

Regarding bioinformatics, it doesn’t have to be a human-centered job. You can get into the data science aspect of it, and make good money off of helping research diseases, for example. This could also be a remote job, and you’d probably have an easier time getting into it. For data science, you can get quite far with Python, which is easier to pick up when compared with other languages.

You can also explore your options further by just asking ChatGPT, and seeing what the potential job requirements would be. It’s decent if you want to brainstorm some stuff, but do look up the information yourself on search engines. Write there your experience, what you’d want, and what to expect if you were to jump in that field. Perhaps this could help you decide better.

I wish you the best of luck!

If you already have medical knowledge, why not look into bioinformatics? Cyber security would be a pretty big jump if you’re not into tweaking computers as a hobby. For example, have you ever set up Linux on your own?

Certifications will give you a starting point, but it will take years for all the information to settle properly in your mind.

Piracy. I’d buy albums if I had money, though. I’ll slowly phase into getting them once I get some more cash.

I can find most stuff I listen to, and I rarely grow my music library. I mostly listen to 20-30 albums, with some more mainstream music peppered in.

My music library currently sits at 90 gigabytes (mostly flacs), so quite small compared to others I’ve seen around here. Still, I have plenty of variation to keep me entertained :D

If you have Tidal, aren’t there some apps to rip the lossless audio from there? You could get most of the stuff that you need, and then cancel the subscription. If you feel bad, maybe order some merch from the band, haha.

The Linux kernel is not flawed, and Redox is probably years away from being even near it. However, having memory-safety from the get-go as a requirement for developing the kernel could lead to fewer exploits, compared to what we have today with Linux. Just as you’ve said, most users are not aware of it/they don’t care, but the big players will care about keeping information safe on their servers. Just to conclude, Redox OS is not just Linux rewritten in Rust, and could potentially have many other benefits that are particularly juicy for data centers. Too bad it’s not production ready yet :D

That’s unfortunate :( I think you can still run it in QEMU, if you’re interested.

I see your point. However, integrating Rust properly in the Linux kernel is an uphill battle. Redox OS is not at all close to being stable, but it showcases that you can build a Rust kernel from scratch, and integrate it into an OS that meets some of the requirements of a modern one. Of course, considering it a toy project and glancing over its potential doesn’t help with adoption. They even mention in their description that currently they can only support a community manager and a student developer with the current donations. When you compare that to the amount of money and developers involved in the Linux kernel, it’s insignificant.

I was not suggesting that the Rust For Linux devs jump ship, but it could be beneficial for the investors behind the project to look at alternatives. Heck, the Linux kernel started as a toy project itself. I believe that a team focused solely on such a Rust-only kernel could spearhead needed changes to reach something stable, as opposed to investing time and money into fighting established C developers to integrate a memory-safe language in the kernel fully.

Good luck! You can try the huggingface-chat repo, or ollama with this web-ui. Both should be decent, as they have instructions to set up a docker container.

I believe the Llama 3 models are out there in a torrent somewhere, but I didn’t dig to find it. For the 70B model, you’ll probably need around 64GB of RAM available, but the 7B one should run fine with just 8GB. It will be somewhat slow though, compared to the ChatGPT experience. The self-attention mechanism can be parallelized, which is why you will see much better results on a GPU. According to some others that tested it, if you offload some stuff to RAM, you could see ~10-12 tokens per second on an RTX 3090 for certain 70B models. But more capable ones will be at less than 1 token per second, all depending on the context window you use.

If you don’t have a GPU available, just give the Phi-3 model a try :D If you quantize it to 4 bits, it can apparently get 12 tokens per second on an iPhone haha. It should play nice with pooling information from a search engine, or a vector database like milvus, qdrant or chroma.

What db2 already said. Microsoft just released Phi-3 mini, which could, allegedly, run locally on newer smartphones.

If I understood correctly, the Rabbit thingy just captures your information locally and then forwards it to their server. So, if you want more power, you could probably do the same by submitting the same info to a bigger open source model than Phi-3, like Llama 3, hosted on your homelab. I believe you can set it up with huggingface/gradio, which sort of provides an API that you could use.

That way, you don’t need a shitty orange box, and can always get the latest open source models with a few lines of code. There are plenty of open source frameworks in the works at the moment, and I believe that we’re not far off from having multi-modal LLMs running on homelab-level hardware (if you don’t mind a bit of lag).

That is good to know. Tried the free version of Roll20 before, and it definitely felt lacking in certain areas. Oh, and thanks for letting me know about the sale! I’ll definitely keep an eye out for that one :)

How will you move to WhatsApp if everyone else uses iMessage? Europe has the same issue, but reversed. Everyone uses WhatsApp and can’t jump to Signal/Telegram because they’re not as popular.

With the way current LLMs operate? The short answer is no. Most machine learning models can learn the probability distribution by performing backward propagation, which involves “trickling down” errors from the output node all the way back to the input. More specifically, the computer calculates the derivatives of each layer and uses that to slowly nudge the model towards the correct answer by updating the values in each neural layer. Of course, things like the attention mechanism resemble the way humans pay attention, but the underlying processes are vastly different.

In the brain, things don’t really work like that. Neurons don’t perform backpropagation, and, if I remember correctly, instead build proteins to improve the conductivity along the axons. This allows us to improve connectivity in a neuron the more current passes through it. Similarly, when multiple neurons in a close region fire together, they sort of wire together. New connections between neurons can appear from this process, which neuroscientists refer to as neuroplasticity.

When it comes to the Doom example you’ve given, that approach relies on the fact that you can encode the visual information to signals. It is a reinforcement learning problem where the action space is small, and the reward function is pretty straight forward. When it comes to LLMs, the usual vocabulary size of the more popular models is between 30-60k tokens (these are small parts of a word, for example “#ing” in “writing”). That means, you would need a way to encode the input of each to feed to the biological neural net, and unless you encode it as a phonetic representation of the word, you’re going to need a lot of neurons to mimic the behaviour of the computer-version of LLMs, which is not really feasible. Oh, and let’s not forget that you would need to formalize the output of the network and find a way to measure that! How would we know which neuron produces the output for a specific part of a sentence?

We humans are capable of learning language, mainly due to this skill being encoded in our DNA. It is a very complex problem that requires the interaction between multiple specialized areas: e.g. Broca’s (for speech), Wernicke’s (understanding and producing language), certain bits in the lower temporal cortex that handle categorization of words and other tasks, plus a way to encode memories using the hippocampus. The body generates these areas using the genetic code, which has been iteratively improved over many millennia. If you dive really deep into this subject, you’ll start seeing some scientists that argue that consciousness is not really a thing and that we are a product of our genes and the surrounding environment, that we act in predefined ways.

Therefore, you wouldn’t be able to call a small neuron array conscious. It only elicits a simple chemical process, which appears when you supply enough current for a few neurons to reach the threshold potential of -55 mV. To have things like emotion, body autonomy and many other things that one would think of when talking about consciousness, you would need a lot more components.

I got NFS Most Wanted (2005) working in Wine, and was somewhat impressed how easy it was at the time. Game worked quite well, and would only crash once in a while with some cryptic errors that I don’t remember. Made me hopeful for the future of linux gaming :)

Job market seems terrible right now, especially if you’re just starting out. Had a friend that applied to ~100 jobs in tech, and a majority of them didn’t even reply back.

But the same can be said about bad HR as well. How many hiring teams have no idea what a candidate is supposed to be doing?

Wow, some of the comments on that article saying Google should have made Android closed source are mindboggling. They realize they never would have had their current worldwide marketshare if they did that, no?

But maybe if they did, we would have had more people working on true linux phones 🤔 I’m a bit torn on this one haha.

The Framework 13 inch model should be plenty, especially if you want to dev on the go. Much more lightweight and smaller, and you can connect it to external monitors if the screen size is not big enough. Also, you shouldn’t have issues running Linux on either laptops.

Instead of going for the 16 version, I would use the extra 900-1000 euros (that’s the amount I saw I could save between the two almost maxed-out models) to make a dedicated server or mini-cluster to run your workloads. Deploy Kubernetes or Proxmox on it, and you’ll also get some more practice on it outside work if you want to run stuff for your home lab. That is only if you don’t want to game on your laptop, but I’d still put that money aside to make a desktop.